


That love that's perfectly unsad

by mkhhhx



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Blood and Injury, M/M, Post-Break Up, References to Depression, Unhealthy Relationships, anger issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27289246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mkhhhx/pseuds/mkhhhx
Summary: They break up in February. The ugly kind of break up. There is screaming and there is a broken lamp and stray plates on the floor of their shared apartment. There’s crying and then there’s silence. There is Jaemin, left in a house too quiet and too cold.
Relationships: Lee Jeno/Na Jaemin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	That love that's perfectly unsad

**Author's Note:**

> This is a pile of angst I wrote for no apparent reason listening to [Heat Waves](https://youtu.be/mRD0-GxqHVo) by Glass Animals on repeat for three hours.  
> Please be mindful of the tags.

They break up in February. The ugly kind of break up. There is screaming and there is a broken lamp and stray plates on the floor of their shared apartment. There’s crying and then there’s silence. There is Jaemin, left in a house too quiet and too cold.

He spends the first weeks seething. Blood boiling and every single muscle tense. They finally lost all control, they fucked up beyond repair. He knows it’s beyond repair because half a month has passed and Jeno hasn’t come back. They always came back to each other. He tries to blame someone or even the universe as a whole, but he knows half of the blame is still on his own shoulders. He gets even angrier.

March brings the kind of cold that you feel deep in your bones at early mornings. It doesn’t bring Jeno back and Jaemin is too proud to look for him, to ask their shared friends, to tap the call button. His anger gives way to something worse: to a numbness that makes the whole world fuzzy at the edges. A numbness that is so familiar it’s almost comforting to him. A numbness he spent the last years living with. He goes to work and he cooks and he exercises and keeps the house clean. He exists but he also doesn’t. Sometimes he cries himself to sleep. Sometimes he stares at the ceiling until the sun rises, going over every single word he said that night and all the nights before. Sometimes he is so out of it that he forgets to charge his phone for days and the lack of battery is the only thing keeping him from calling in the middle of the night. Sometimes he cries out Jeno’s name biting his pillow and when he’s done he feels even emptier than before.

They were made for each other, that’s what people said and maybe that’s the sole thing that kept them together for so long. Eight years and four months. Six good years, one and a half that should have warned them about their relationship falling apart and then the last ten months when the house of cards crumbled on top of them. Ten months filled with nothing but anger and bitterness.

“Do you love me, or do you love the idea of me?” Jeno has whispered one night. His arm was bleeding, but he was terribly calm. The kitchen window behind him was shattered. A punch in a fit of anger.

“Of course I love you, what are you saying?” Jaemin wanted to take him to the ER, wanted to take him into his arms and kiss everything better. It used to be so easy and he didn’t know when it started being so hard. Being so destructive.

“No,” Jeno had said. His eyes were lifeless and the side of his jacket soaked with blood. His varsity jacket from the university’s boxing team. Ruined beyond salvation. It was two and a half months until the end and Jaemin knew the due date was coming. It was the first time he didn’t try to defend them, them as a single unit. He was tired, too tired of fighting, too tired of broken things, too tired of Jeno’s anger and disappointment. Maybe if Jaemin had let go sooner Jeno wouldn’t have stitches all across his arm. Maybe if Jaemin had let go early enough it would hurt less in the long run.

But neither let go until the very end. Until they bared their worst selves to each other. Until there was nothing left. Nothing to give and nothing to take but sharp words and rough hands.

It’s April and Jaemin lives more in the past than the present. His friends are worried but they won’t say a word. He sits on the couch and curls under the quilt they took from Jeno’s house. Shuts his eyes and thinks back, back to the start. Back when he met the boy with the toothy smile at elementary. Back to their first kiss in the high school locker room. Back to their first proper date right after the prom dance. He thinks of university, drunk on each other’s love while struggling with classes and money. Jeno playing the guitar and Jaemin loving him, loving him more than he ever thought he was capable of loving a person.

He is thinking of them moving in together out of campus, starting their lives. Putting aside what little they could save up every month for rings. They had promised each other the world and they had promised each other eternity.

He doesn’t remember when Jeno started being angry. He doesn’t remember when the balance shifted and the universe stopped effortlessly working to their favor. For a while nothing was wrong, but everything was shifting. Shifting a little to the left, a little to the right until the disturbance was enough to knock them down.

He remembers the first time Jeno punched something. An ugly dent on the door they both ignored. The start of the end. And Jeno never laid a finger on Jaemin, but sometimes, on the dark late nights Jaemin thinks it would hurt less.

He doesn’t remember when he started being sad either. When his mind started being hazy and every little thing was so damn hard. Waking up and dressing himself. Looking at his boyfriend. Existing without feeling something is off, despite it being one of the few things he could feel.

May is a little kinder to him. The sun is out more and there is so much light in the living rooms at mornings. He wonders if Jeno still wakes up at dawn to bike before work. He wonders if Jeno misses him. He wonders if they could patch everything that was left and stitch it in a mockery of their previous relationship.

Friends visit and he pretends to have fun for the evening. And then they leave and he stares at the wall, feeling the tears that he can’t shed anymore pricking at the corners of his eyes. He almost calls but he doesn’t. He stares at the ugly dent on the door that makes him miss Jeno even more. Sometimes he realizes how fucked up it was. Sometimes he doesn’t even care.

“We can try therapy,” he had said five months before the end. Jeno was crying, a mess on the floor. Jaemin was standing a few feet away, looking at the aftermath of the fight. “It might help.”

Jeno had ignored him and Jaemin went to sleep. Slept listening to Jeno’s sobs through the walls. Woke up to find Jeno sleeping on the couch. They never slept together again.

Mid-June he gets a text on a Saturday night. A simple “I miss you,” from Jeno.

“Do you miss me, or do you miss the idea of me,” he whispers, nobody but himself to hear it. There’s a framed picture of them in the living room. The first picture they took in that same house. Jeno’s smile is sickening and Jaemin throws the frame in the trash. He feels so numb he forgets about the message for a couple of days.

He starts feeling a little better. Looking at his hands when working on his computer, looking at his reflection before a shower he’s nothing but a miserable pile of skin and bones, tired eyes and red skin at the spots he obsessively scratches when the stress becomes too much. But it’s better. He doesn’t cry himself to sleep. He doesn’t cry at all. Sometimes he feeds the stray cats outside his office and they rub on his legs. The only kind of contact he can stomach. He’s getting better. He’s getting over Jeno.

Jeno knocks on his door. It’s July and the heat is unbearable, even at nights. One of the stray cats lives in Jaemin’s apartment now. It’s a Saturday night and he’s working on his laptop when he hears the knock. He hears an “It’s me,” and he feels like he’s been set on fire. He stays still and waits for the moment to pass. Waits to wake up from his dream. Waits for his mind to stop playing tricks on him. There’s another knock. Almost timid. He never changed the code on the door.

He opens up and comes face to face with a wreck. The stitches have healed to patches of red-brown up and down Jeno’s arm. He looks at Jaemin in a way he has never done before.

“You never answered my message,” Jeno says. Jaemin lets him in. “Did you see it?”

Jaemin stares. Talking is hard. Looking at Jeno is hard too because he’s nothing but a shell of his past self. Tired and beat up. Jaemin doesn’t love him. Jaemin doesn’t even love the idea of them anymore.

“Why are you here?” He manages. His voice sounds weird to his own ears. He is sweating but his fingertips are frozen like the blood has stopped circulating in his veins, like his heart is about to stop too.

Jeno looks at the place the bedroom door used to be. The dented one. Jaemin hated it so much he took it off the seams and threw it away. He didn’t really need a bedroom door.

“I missed you,” Jeno says. “I wanted to see if you are well.” Jeno’s eyes fall to the nail at the living room wall next. The one that used to hold a frame underneath.

“I think you have taken everything of yours,” Jaemin replies. “There’s nothing left here.”

Jeno’s face falls and Jaemin instinctively hates it. Wants to make things better. Wants to mend things. Pick the pieces of their relationship even if they are countless tiny glass pieces of a whole shattered window. It lasts only a moment and then it’s gone. Then there’s nothing. Nothing but the echoes of screaming and crying in that tiny living room. The ugly sound of the window shattering as the neighbor’s daughter was watching from across the road. Nothing but everything that has stomped Jaemin to the ground.

“Do you want me to go?” Jeno’s shoulders are hunched and his frame looks so small. Jaemin remembers kissing them on nights like this, sweat between their bodies and the summer breeze coming from the open windows. It’s such a faraway memory that he’s almost convinced it’s something from a movie he watched long ago instead of his own life.

“Yes,” he says simply. “I think you should go.”

“I’m so sorry for-“ Jeno steps back to the door.

“Just go, Jeno.” Jaemin is drained. He’s drained and his worst nightmare has come true. He stands there, in front of Jeno Lee, without a drop of love left. Nothing. Nothing for his best friend of nine years and lover of another eight. It’s as shocking as it is comforting.

There’s the door clicking shut when Jeno leaves without another word. There isn’t silence this time. The house is too warm and quiet, but Jaemin doesn’t mind. His cat rubs up to him and when he lets himself cry, he knows. It’s the end before a start.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading <3  
> You can find me [here](https://twitter.com/kuns_dimples)!


End file.
